Daily Readings of FJP

Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by its corresponding actions: The habit of walking makes us better walkers, regular running makes us better runners. It is the same regarding matters of the soul. Whenever you are angry, you increase your anger; you have increased a habit and added fuel to a fire. If you don't want an angry temper, then don't feed the habit. Give it nothing to help its increase. Be quiet at first and reckon the days in which you have not been angry. "I used to be angry every day; no every other ay; then every third and fourth day." As time goes on, the habit is first weakened and is then eventually overridden by a wiser response.

All human beings seek a happy life, but many confuse the means—for example, wealth and status—with that life itself. This misguided focus on the means to a good life makes people get further from a happy life. The really worthwhile things are virtuous activities that make up a happy life, not the external means that may seem to produce it.

Take care not to casually discuss matters that are of great importance to you with people who are not important to you. Your affairs will become drained of preciousness. You undercut your own purposes when you do this. This is especially dangerous when you are in the early stages of an undertaking. Other people feast like vultures on our ideas. They take it upon themselves to blithely interpret, judge, and twist what matters most to you, and your heart sinks. Let your ideas and plans incubate before you parade them in front of the naysayers and trivializers. Most people only know how to respond to an idea by pouncing on its shortfalls rather than identifying its potential merits. Practice self-containment so that your enthusiasm won't be frittered away.

Practice having a grateful attitude and you will be happy. If you take a broad view of what befalls each person and appreciate the usefulness of things that happen, it is natural to give thanks to the Ultimate for everything that happens in the world.

Regardless of what is going on around you, make the best of what is in your power, and take the rest as it occurs.

Your relentless pursuit of wisdom postpones your actually possessing it. Quit chasing after tonics and new teachers. The latest fashionable sage or book or diet or belief doesn't move you in the direction of a flourishing life. You do. Renounce externals once and for all. Practice self-sufficiency. Don't remain a dependent, malleable patient: Become your own soul's doctor.

Rationality isn't everything. There are many domains of life to which it lacks access. The greatest mysteries of existence exceed its reach. Still, our reason is the best faculty we have to safeguard our integrity. Most people do not understand the correct use of arguments by inference and the proper use of logical forms, so they conduct themselves in a random, overly reactive, or muddled fashion and are easily misled. Clear thinking is not bloodless art. Reason's job is to critically test our conjectures, both our interpretations and our method of arriving at them. Reason is not an end by an indispensable instrument. Questions are the engines of reason. Thus you need to learn how to frame questions sensibly, rather than emotionally. If your ability to think clearly is compromised, your moral life can become fuzzy and equivocal. Reason can distinguish error from the truth and a deep truth from a petty one. The marks of good reasoning are clarity, consistency, rigor, precision of definitions, and avoidance

This is our predicament: Over and over again, we lose sight of what is important and what isn't. We crave things over which we have no control, and are not satisfied by the things within our control. We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing or hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice.

Pursue good ardently. But if your efforts fall short, accept the result and move on.

Virtue is our aim and purpose. The virtue that leads to enduring happiness is not a quid pro quo goodness. (I'll be good "in order to" get something.) Goodness in and of itself is the practice and the reward. Goodness isn't ostentatious piety or showy good manners. It's a lifelong series of subtle readjusting of our character. We fine-tune our thoughts, words, and deeds in a progressively wholesome direction. The virtue inheres in our intentions and our deeds, not in the results. Why should we bother being good? To be good is to be happy; to be tranquil and worry-free. When you actively engage in gradually refining yourself, you retreat from your lazy ways of covering yourself or making excuses. Instead of feeling a persistent current of low-level shame, you move forward by using the creative possibilities of this moment, your current situation. You begin to fully inhabit this moment, instead of seeking escape or wishing that what is going on were otherwise. You move through your life by being thoroughly in

The untrained response to robbers and thugs and to those who otherwise err is outrage and retribution. Wrongdoers need to be rightly understood to form the correct response to their behavior. The appropriate response to bad deeds is a pity for the perpetrators since they have adopted unsound beliefs and are deprived of the most valuable human capacity: the ability to differentiate between what's truly good and bad for them. Their original moral intuitions have been distorted, so they have no chance at inner security. Whenever someone does something foolish, pity him rather than yield to hatred and anger as so many do. We are only enraged at the foolish because we make idols of those things which such people take from us.

We are born into essential goodness, endowed with natural intuitions about what is good and worthy and what is not. This endemic moral capacity must then be trained deliberately and systematically to bring out its best in full maturity. It is natural to want to be well-regarded by others, but you must gradually wean yourself from such dependence on the admiration or honor given or withheld by others. In good fortune or adversity, it is the goodwill with which you perform deeds that matters—not the outcome. So take your attention off of what you think other people think and off of the results of your actions. Defer instead to your original moral intuitions and follow them.

To live a life of virtue, you have to become consistent, even when it isn't conceivable, comfortable, or easy. It is incumbent that your thoughts, words, and deeds match up. This is a higher standard than that help by the mob. Most people want to be good and try somewhat to be good, but then a moral challenge presents itself and lassitude sets in. When your thoughts, words, and deeds form a seamless fabric, you streamline your efforts and thus eliminate worry and dread. In this way, it is easier to seek goodness than to conduct yourself in a haphazard fashion or according to the feelings of the moment. When you free yourself of the distractions of shallow or illusory pleasures and devote yourself instead to your rightful duties, you can relax. When you know you've done the best you can under the circumstances, you can have a light heart. Your mind doesn't have to moonlight, making excuses, thinking up alibis, defending your honor, feeling guilty or remorseful. You can simply, cleanly, move on to the next t

Generally, we're all doing the best we can. When someone speaks to you curtly, disregards what you say, performs what seems to be a thoughtless gesture or even an outright evil act, think to yourself, "If I were that person and had endured the same trials, borne the same heartbreaks, had the same parents, and so on, I probably would have done or said the same thing." We are not privy to the stories behind people's actions, so we should be patient with others and suspend our judgment of them, recognizing the limits of our understanding. This does not mean we condone evil deeds or endorse the idea that different actions carry the same moral weight. When people do not act as you would wish them to, exercise the muscles of your good nature by shrugging your shoulders and saying to yourself "Oh well." Then let the incident go. Try, also, to be as kind to yourself as possible. do not measure yourself against others or even against your ideal self. Human betterment is a gradual, two-steps-forward, one-step-back e

One of two things will happen when you socialize with others. You either become like your companions, or you bring them over to your own ways. Just as when a dead coal contacts a live one, either the first will extinguish the last, or the last kindle the first. Great is the danger; so be circumspect on entering into personal associations, even and especially light-hearted ones. Most of us do not possess sufficiently developed steadfastness to steer our companions to our own purpose, so we end up being carried along by the crowd. Our own values and ideals become fuzzy and tainted; our resolve is destabilized. It's hard to resist when friends or associates start speaking brashly. Caught off guard when our associates broach ignoble subjects, we are swept along by the social momentum. It is the nature of the conversation that its multiple meanings, innuendos, and personal motivations move along at such a fast clip, they can instantly shit into unwholesome directions, sullying everyone involved. So until wise se

Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful but would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.

Consider your deepest and most secret yearnings as if they were merely facts, so you can see ho insubstantial and hysterical they are. There is no shame in pursuing worldly success: It's normal. Your trouble lies not in the pursuit itself, but how you pursue it. You allow your frenzied, misguided desires and fears to color your judgment. So you over evaluate the intrinsic worth of your pursuits. You bank on your pursuits to give you happiness, thus confusing means with ends. Understand that while the pursuit of such indifferent objectives is natural, neither failure nor success in attaining them has the slightest bearing on your happiness.

One cannot pursue one's own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others. A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement. Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings. Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent, rich, or well educated, but to all our human brethren. View yourself as a citizen of a worldwide community and act accordingly.

The difference between the instructed and the ignorant is that the wise know that the virtuous are invincible. They aren't tricked and provoked by the way things appear to be. The instructed respect the kinship we share with the Ultimate and thus comport themselves as a compassionate, self-aware citizen of the universe. They understand that the wise life, which leads to tranquility, comes from conforming to Nature and to Reason.